America: Like a Rolling Stone

[dweller]

by Steven Laffoley

In the shadowy twilight of a cool September evening, I watch a rough wind blow through the leaves outside my living room window.
For days, I've wrestled with a rank despair born of a president's non-response to a devastating hurricane in New Orleans and of
presidential indifference to an endless, immoral war in Iraq. I am nauseous from the undisguised, ugly neglect of the American ideal
by those entrusted to protect and defend it. And I no longer know what to say or do.

I move away from the window and walk to a short pine cabinet where, looking for some solace in music, I shuffle through my CDs
and find Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan. Always cryptic, yet starkly prescient, Dylan's music fits this unsettling moment and
mood, and so I open the plastic case, place the disc in a small wood and steel player, and turn the sound up - loud.

The crash of the first drumbeat is followed by a storm wave of organ and electric guitar, and over the top sings Dylan: "Once upon a
time, you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime, in your prime, didn't you?" And as the question hangs in the air, I think of
America.

In 1776, both a nation and an ideal were born. America was to be the land of "We the People," of equal opportunity, a land where
every American had an equal chance of finding success. And so too this American ideal said to all - rich and poor, black and white -
that we were, in the deepest and richest sense of community, in this together.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0912-20.htm

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